The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  “I’m not nervous,” Tiffany says, her voice mild and somewhat affectless. “Not anymore. I only get nervous in airplanes, and that’s just because I’m not in control.”

  She is sitting with Tobin, his wife, and three of their children in a faux-Italian restaurant a few miles east of Disney World, in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, and she has a plate of black olives in one hand and a portable phone in the other. Black olives are her favorite food. The portable phone is George Tobin’s favorite tool. While the Tobins eat pizza and talk about their plans for visiting Disney World tomorrow, Tiffany is working the phone, occasionally popping black olives into her mouth, and mostly solidifying her fan base of support.

  “Tiff,” Tobin says, pushing a piece of paper toward her, “call this guy first at the radio station. I told him you’d do a phoner.”

  She tucks the phone under her chin and, after listening for a minute, says into the phone, “Okay, I’ve got it.” Then in a louder voice she says, “Hi, this is Tiffany and you’re listening to WKO . . . uh, oh, I’m a nerd. I forgot the call letters.” She takes a big breath and starts again.

  “Hi, this is Tiffany, and you’re listening to—oh, God, I’m a nerd. I’m a nerd.”

  The table is getting quieter now.

  “I’ll get it,” she says. Her voice is still composed, but her face—usually peachy pale and bloodless—is reddening. “I am such a nerd.”

  On the third try she runs through the sentence without a hitch, and the Tobin family resumes conversation. After finishing his food, George reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a tan plastic gadget, flicks its switch, and shows it to me. “Got it in England,” he says, tapping the gadget’s little display screen. “Great new toy. It’s a real computer! One hundred and twenty-eight K of memory.” He pokes a button and the display lights up. “Isn’t that something?” he says. “Remembers everything.”

  AFTER DINNER, Tobin and I ride over to the Magic Kingdom. Tobin mentions that he has been in the music business for decades—he was a staff producer for Motown in the early seventies, has produced Smokey Robinson and Natalie Cole, and now owns recording studios in North Hollywood, where he first encountered Tiffany. A beefy man with shaggy hair and clear green eyes, he has a way of fixing his gaze and stating his case that gives him an unflaggingly imperious manner.

  Tonight, though, it’s clear that he is anxious. This will be Tiffany’s first real concert, and she will have to perform three times—nine-thirty, eleven-thirty, and one-thirty in the morning. This will also be the first time she has worked with a stylist and a choreographer. Moreover, the show is going to be filmed for her next video—two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cameras and crew will be standing around waiting for one good rendition of “I Saw Her Standing There.” Plus, there’s a matter of prestige. Ray Parker, Jr., Exposé, Regina Belle, and Roger will also be playing in the Magic Kingdom tomorrow night, but they have been relegated to small stages in Tomorrowland, Frontierland, and Fantasyland. Tiffany, though, has been assigned to the most prominent stage—the platform in front of Cinderella Castle, the hub of the Magic Kingdom, which straddles the border between Main Street, USA, and Fantasyland.

  As soon as we arrive at the castle, Tobin is set upon by the video director, the road crew, Disney representatives, and the stagehands, all of whom are as anxious as Tobin. Can Tiffany move well on this big stage? Can she follow the band? Can she talk long enough between songs to give the band enough time to reprogram the synthesizers? Can she give the camera crew good stuff even with the distraction of the audience? Look—it’s one thing for her to sing to shoppers in malls and to make those slick, sprightly cover versions of old hit records, but this is different. Now there’s a lot of money and expectations and a certain critical consideration in play.

  Tomorrow night is shaping up as a calculated gamble that this little girl with the big voice isn’t just an attractive youngster expertly pushed and packaged, but something for real. And at the moment, on the stage in front of Cinderella Castle, a lot of large adult males are banking on those odds.

  TIFFANY IS DANCING in the dressing room. It’s Friday afternoon now, only four hours before the show, and she is practicing stage moves with a fake microphone while a choreographer flown in from Los Angeles watches and corrects her.

  “Cross your hands like this,” he says, snapping his wrists across his chest.

  She duplicates the move, carefully and somewhat gawkily organizing her long arms and legs as directed. All the while she is staring at herself in the mirror. She is at an age when even a month or two makes a noticeable difference in your looks. Even though the photograph on her album cover is just a year old, she has already lost the placid, babyish look it conveys—her face now tapers more sharply at the chin; her straight red hair is longer and heavier; her dark brown eyes have less of the wounded fawn in them and more of the maturing and somewhat exhausted teenager who has been working nonstop for several months.

  “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Tiffany says and then slumps into a chair. “I’m tired.” She fluffs her hair and sinks down.

  For the last forty-five days she has been making appearances to support the record; after Disney World, she will begin an extensive concert tour—playing arenas if the ticket sales materialize—and she will start recording her next album. Even Tobin admits that she is exhausted, but he is the one setting the pace. “We have to build up the fan base now,” he explained earlier in the day. “We want as many people to see her as possible. The demand for her is out there now.”

  Tiffany spent the morning in the Magic Kingdom—the only free time she will have to be a teenage tourist on this trip. “I went on Space Mountain four times,” she says, a little morosely. “I should have saved it. After Space Mountain, nothing was quite as thrilling. I guess I’m the kind of person who is always going to go on the best ride and then immediately say, ‘What’s next?’ And unfortunately nothing is ever as good.”

  Tiffany Darwish met Tobin when she was twelve. The only child of a small-aircraft pilot and a secretary who were divorced when she was two, she grew up in Norwalk, California, a quiet town north of Los Angeles. Her stepfather negotiated her first, albeit impromptu, gig—a few songs with a band that was playing at a barbecue. She was nine years old. By the time she was twelve, she was singing with country bands in town.

  That year a local songwriter asked her to sing on demo tapes for a few of his songs and reserved recording time for the session at one of George Tobin’s North Hollywood studios. Tobin was producing a Smokey Robinson album at the time and probably would have never noticed the little girl if one of the studio hands hadn’t called him over to hear Tiffany sing. It seemed that she was able to mimic anything with her full, elastic voice: all-out weepy country laments, zippy pop songs, even the growls and yelps of rock and roll.

  “I was enthralled by her voice,” George Tobin recalls. “It was like taffy—you could pull it anywhere. In under ten minutes, I decided to sign her. I had a dream of where she could go. When I do a project, I get totally immersed in it. I got really obsessed with her. I just kept thinking that I had to do something with her.”

  Over the next year and a half, Tobin stayed in contact with Tiffany and her mother and tried to find a manager for her. At first he had intended just to produce her records. “None of the managers I approached were interested in her,” he says. “Then I realized I needed a manager for her who could see eye to eye with me, and the only person who sees eye to eye with me is me. I’d watched so many other managers make horrendous mistakes, so I finally decided that I would manage her myself.”

  In 1986 they signed a seven-album exclusive production and management contract that gave Tobin complete control of Tiffany’s records, videos, and performances. Any record company interested in her would have to sign a contract with George Tobin Productions, which would in turn provide the company with Tiffany product. It is far more common for an artist to sign directly with a record company and also to retain separ
ate people to produce her records and manage her affairs, but Tiffany’s arrangement with Tobin isn’t completely novel—it’s a system, a consolidation of control, just like the one Motown has used for developing new and especially young acts. Except this time, the manager, not the record company, is calling all the shots.

  “I learned a whole lot working [at Motown],” Tobin says. “Tiffany is signed to me—one hundred percent signed to me. The record company has no part of her. They deal with me.”

  In the beginning of 1986, Tobin started recording. Tiffany’s mother, who according to Tobin declines to be interviewed, had wanted her to be a flat-out country singer, but Tobin started her on a regimen of light pop, loping ballads, and covers of rock and roll standards, because, he says, you have to be in Nashville to do country, and besides, there’s so much money to be made in rock and pop.

  “Her mother did think covering a Beatles song was sacrilegious, so we just never sent those tapes home,” Tobin admits. “But her mother doesn’t get involved. The family has decided that I manage the act.”

  He sent Tiffany’s tapes around and was rebuffed immediately—most record companies said they simply didn’t know how to promote such a young kid. So Tobin got more aggressive, having Tiffany sing in his studio for small groups of record executives, and he once even sent her to see Clive Davis, president of Arista Records, at his room in the Beverly Hills Hotel, so she could perform for him. “I wanted people to look her right in the face when they said no,” Tobin says.

  Tobin tells the story of negotiating for her record contract without pulling a punch—such and such record company hated her, so-and-so didn’t hear anything in her voice at all—and there’s a lot of glee in his voice, the sound of someone who is now savoring the right to say “I told you so.” Tiffany is sitting beside him, and rather than seeming embarrassed or hurt by these tales of rejection, she is impassive.

  “Remember this, Tiff?” Tobin says and starts to laugh. “I think it was Epic and MCA wanted her, and I think the guy from Epic said, ‘What should we do, play poker for her?’ ” Tiffany shrugs and looks down. “Anyway,” Tobin continues, “I wanted to go with a West Coast company, and the main reason I went with MCA is because their offices are one mile from my office, and if I want to get something done, I can drive down there and block their cars on their driveway with my car, which I have done, and not let them out until it’s settled.”

  MCA paid George Tobin Productions $150,000 for Tiffany’s record. And it was certainly ready—Tobin had taped forty-eight songs in his sessions with her, from ages fourteen to fifteen.

  BUT UNTIL THE BEAUTIFUL YOU: Celebrating the Good Life Shopping Mall Tour ’87 came about, Tiffany’s album just sat in the MCA warehouses. “We didn’t know how to promote it, how to market it,” says Larry Solters, senior vice president of MCA Records. “Radio had been burned by teen stars like Bobby Sherman and Shaun Cassidy. Radio was very tentative about her. Plus, she was only sixteen and the themes on the record are very adult themes. Maybe we got overly analytical about it.”

  As Solters remembers it, he was stumped for a few months until he thought of sending Tiffany on a tour of shopping malls. He approached Shopping Center Network, a marketing company that sets up promotions in malls; the company’s Beautiful You: Celebrating the Good Life Tour, which had such sponsors as Toyota, Clairol, and Adidas, was already under way, and Tiffany was invited to join it. As Tobin remembers it, MCA stalled on promoting the record for a year and a half, so he came to Tiffany’s rescue—he threatened to “ninja his way into Larry Solters’s office” and yank the record unless MCA came up with a promotion plan within the week.

  “I don’t remember having that conversation,” Solters says.

  On the Beautiful You: Celebrating the Good Life Shopping Mall Tour ’87, Tiffany would stand on small stages set up in the hub of the mall and sing her songs along with instrumental tapes while the tour sponsors spread corporate goodwill with exhibits and giveaways. She performed at ten malls, beginning with the Bergen Mall, in Paramus, New Jersey, during the summer break between her sophomore and junior years at Leffingwell Christian High School, in Norwalk. Tobin videotaped the shows himself and later patched them together to make a music video.

  “It was embarrassing at first,” Tiffany says of singing in the malls. “People were laughing and giving me weird reactions.”

  “I loved it,” Tobin says, “because it was a new idea, and at least it was an idea. It would move her career forward.”

  That it did. By the end of the tour, this past September, the little crowds had turned into gigantic crowds, and the sixty albums sold in Paramus became hundreds sold in the mall in Littleton, Colorado. The light, palatable music and Tiffany’s amiable style first attracted young girls, then young boys, and then an older audience as well. In the fall, two radio programmers, one in Salt Lake City and one in Chicago, started playing “I Think We’re Alone Now,” her cover of the 1967 Tommy James and the Shondells classic, which Tiffany, who was born in 1971, remembers having heard once or twice. When the single went to Number One in November, it knocked a Michael Jackson song off the top of the charts.

  “I HEARD SHE’S A BRAT,” says the small guy in the Disney staff uniform. “I heard she threw some kind of fit over her toast this morning at breakfast.”

  “She’s not a brat at all,” his female co-worker answers. “Actually, she’s very sweet. She’s really very quiet.”

  The woman speaking is a Disney employee who has been assigned to drive Tiffany, Tiffany’s manager, and the entire Tiffany organization around during Tiffany’s stint at Disney World. The woman’s main job isn’t being a VIP chauffeur. “Oh, no,” she says. “Most of the time, I’m Pluto. You know, one of the characters in the Magic Kingdom.” But all the Disney people pitch in to help the company whenever necessary.

  The small guy also works as Pluto and, whenever duty calls, Jiminy Cricket. He was just on his way home after his Pluto shift when he spotted the Tiffany van parked behind the service entrance to Cinderella Castle. It’s been all the talk among the employees in the castle—who exactly is Tiffany, this little kid, this little high schooler, who has a hit record and will be appearing on the main stage in a matter of minutes?

  The woman leans over the steering wheel and says to him, “Actually, I’m not sure I’ve heard her say very much at all. I can’t say I know her, but I doubt she’d have a fit over her toast or anything like that.”

  Upstairs, in the dressing room, Tobin is stalking around with his portable phone. Each time it rings, he answers it by saying, “Penthouse suite, home of the rich and famous!” in a pointedly loud voice. The choreographer is sitting in the corner eating Girl Scout cookies; the stylist, who has also been flown in from Los Angeles, is adjusting Tiffany’s new pants.

  Tiffany usually wears jeans and sweaters onstage, but because this show will be filmed for the video, she is wearing a special outfit—black leather jacket, black leggings, white crew-neck shirt, and boots. Tobin says he leaves clothes and makeup decisions to Tiffany and the stylist. The stylist says later that the only preference Tiffany has ever expressed was that she wanted to wear black, but a number of people close to Tiffany say privately that Tobin has strict guidelines for her clothes—no flash, no glitter, and nothing that emphasizes Tiffany’s fast-maturing figure.

  “The trip with her,” Tobin said to me earlier in the day, “is that she could baby-sit for you. She poses no threat to anybody. Not to parents, not to other sixteen-year-old girls.” He wants nothing to compromise that. “The artist’s image has to always be intact. You have to do whatever you can to keep it from being altered.” It’s the reason he is adamant that she not appear in movies, the predictable jump for a cute, personable celebrity like Tiffany. “It could be confusing to her audience,” Tobin explained. “What’s a thirteen-year-old girl going to think of Tiffany if she’s playing a psycho? Besides, there’s a lot more money in being a recording star.”

  During the last few mi
nutes before the show, Tobin answers a volley of phone calls from his office in Los Angeles, the video director downstairs, and the Disney front office, but all the while he is carefully monitoring Tiffany’s preparation. At one point a photographer shoots a picture of her having her eye makeup applied. “Don’t take pictures of her having her makeup done,” Tobin snaps, “and don’t take pictures of her eating. You know and I know how that looks.”

  Tiffany wrinkles her forehead and says in a low voice, “He says don’t take pictures of me eating, but that’s what I do. I eat.”

  It is the only time—and it seems a nanosecond at most—that she appears to chafe openly at his grip, and it is a grip. He talks throughout her interviews, hovers over her during photo sessions, listens to her phone calls. He scolds her if she makes a move without his knowledge. Early this morning he vetoed a shopping trip she and I had planned, saying he didn’t want Tiffany to go outside the hotel with me. Later he won’t allow me to speak to her on the telephone unless he can listen in.

  In spite of all this, she doesn’t seem crowded—but then again his brashness and aggression seem to grow in her presence, just as her reserve and passivity do in his. Maybe it’s a perfect match—an unformed, talented youngster who has found her mentor—or maybe his unyielding influence on her so early in her life has convinced her that this is the only way that things could possibly be. He has, after all, made her a star.